PS 3238 

























.^ 



'oV T 












* ^ 










r ^> *,;. 4 a* 







4* * 

? %*^.y* V^V \JQ&S S % '. 




14 




***** 













***** 




.i* /.iAWV* ^ 




x u ^ 






%.y :i&« \^' %<? 




+* CT c ° " ° * **b 



'o>v 














W 




** A 




■^ 








A 'V " m C 



***** 










o > 






V * 



^..* ^ 



7i . ^a ^ 




W 














4 o 



^ .... V-'" .^ 








The edition of this book consists of six 
hundred copies on this Fabriano hand- 
made paper, and the type distributed. 

This copy is Number "235" 



Walt Whitman: Yesterday & Today 



WALT WHITMAN 



Teste rd ay & Today 



BY 

Henry Eduard Legler 




CHICAGO 

BROTHERS OF THE BOOK 

1916 



f$3 



tf 



,L* 



Copyright 1916 

BY THE 

Brothers of the Book 



flf® ^ 



V 

3 26 W\1 



©CI.A457590 



To Dr. Max Henius 

CONSISTENT HATER OF SHAMS 

ARDENT LOVER OF ALL OUTDOORS 

AND GENEROUS GIVER OF SELF 

IN GENUINE FELLOWSHIP 

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED 



Walt Whitman: Yesterday & Today 



ON a day about mid-year in 1855, the conventional 
literary world was startled into indecorous behav- 
ior by the unannounced appearance of a thin quarto 
sheaf of poems, in form and in tone unlike anything of 
precedent issue. It was called Leaves of Grass, and 
there were but twelve poems in the volume. No author's 
name appeared upon the title page, the separate poems 
bore no captions, there was no imprint of publisher. A 
steel engraving of a man presumably between thirty and 
forty years of age, coatless, shirt flaringly open at the 
neck, and a copyright notice identifying Walter Whit- 
man with the publication, furnished the only clues. Un- 
couth in size, atrociously printed, and shockingly frank 
in the language employed, the volume evoked such a 
tirade of rancorous condemnation as perhaps bears no 
parallel in the history of letters. From contemporary 
criticisms might be compiled an Anthology of Ana- 
thema comparable to Wagner's Schimpf-Lexicon, or the 
Dictionary of Abuse suggested by William Archer for 
Henrik Ibsen. Some of the striking adjectives and 
phrases employed in print would include the following, 
as applied either to the verses or their author: 

[9] 



The slop-bucket of Walt Whitman. 

A belief in the preciousness of filth. 

Entirely bestial. 

Nastiness and animal insensibility to shame. 

Noxious weeds. 

Impious and obscene. 

Disgusting burlesque. 

Broken out of Bedlam. 

Libidinousness and swell of self-applause. 

Defilement. 

Crazy outbreak of conceit and vulgarity. 

Ithyphallic audacity. 

Gross indecency. 

Sunken sensualist. 

Rotten garbage of licentious thoughts. 

Roots like a pig. 

Rowdy Knight Errant. 

A poet whose indecencies stink in the nostrils. 

Its liberty is the wildest license; its love the essence 

of the lowest lust! 
Priapus — worshipping obscenity. 
Rant and rubbish. 
Linguistic silliness. 
Inhumanly insolent. 
Apotheosis of Sweat. 
Mouthings of a mountebank. 
Venomously malignant. 

[10] 



Pretentious twaddle. 

Degraded helot of literature. 

His work, like a maniac's robe, bedizened with flut- 
tering tags of a thousand colors. 

Roaming, like a drunken satyr, with inflamed 
blood, through every field of lascivious thought. 

Muck of abomination. 
A few quotations from the press of this period will 
serve to indicate the general tenor of comment: 

"The book might pass for merely hectoring and ludi- 
crous, if it were not something a great deal more 
offensive," observed the Christian Examiner (Boston, 
1856). "It openly deifies the bodily organs, senses, and 
appetites in terms that admit of no double sense. The 
author is 'one of the roughs, a Kosmos, disorderly, 
fleshly, sensual, divine inside and out. The scent of 
these armpits an aroma finer than prayer/ He leaves 
'washes and razors for foofoos/ thinks the talk about 
virtue and vice only 'blurt,' he being above and indiffer- 
ent to both of them. These quotations are made with 
cautious delicacy. We pick our way as cleanly as we can 
between other passages which are more detestable." 

In columns of bantering comment, after parodying 
his style of all-inclusiveness, the United States Review 
(1855) characterizes Walt Whitman thus: "No skulker 
or tea-drinking poet is Walt Whitman. He will bring 
poems to fill the days and nights — fit for men and 

[11] 



women with the attributes of throbbing blood and flesh. 
The body, he teaches, is beautiful. Sex is also beauti- 
ful. Are you to be put down, he seems to ask, to that 
shallow level of literature and conversation that stops 
a man's recognizing the delicious pleasure of his sex, or 
a woman hers? Nature he proclaims inherently clean. 
Sex will not be put aside; it is the great ordination of 
the universe. He works the muscle of the male and the 
teeming fibre of the female throughout his writings, as 
wholesome realities, impure only by deliberate inten- 
tion and effort. To men and women, he says, you can 
have healthy and powerful breeds of children on no less 
terms than these of mine. Follow me, and there shall 
be taller and richer crops of humanity on the earth." 

From Studies among the Leaves, printed in the 
Crayon (New York, 1856), this extract may be taken: 
"With a wonderful vigor of thought and intensity of 
perception, a power, indeed, not often found, Leaves of 
Grass has no identity, no concentration, no purpose — 
it is barbarous, undisciplined, like the poetry of a half- 
civilized people, and as a whole useless, save to those 
miners of thought who prefer the metal in its unworked 
state." 

The New York Daily Times (1856) asks: "What 
Centaur have we here, half man, half beast, neighing 
defiance to all the world? What conglomerate of 
thought is this before us, with insolence, philosophy, 

[12] 



tenderness, blasphemy, beauty, and gross indecency 
tumbling in drunken confusion through the pages? Who 
is this arrogant young man who proclaims himself the 
Poet of the time, and who roots like a pig among a rot- 
ten garbage of licentious thoughts?" 

"Other poets," notes a writer in the Brooklyn Daily 
Eagle (1856), "other poets celebrate great events, per- 
sonages, romances, wars, loves, passions, the victories 
and power of their country, or some real or imagined 
incident — and polish their work, and come to conclu- 
sions, and satisfy the reader. This poet celebrates 
natural propensities in himself; and that is the way he 
celebrates all. He comes to no conclusions, and does 
not satisfy the reader. He certainly leaves him what 
the serpent left the woman and the man, the taste of 
the Paradise tree of the knowledge of good and evil, 
never to be erased again." 

"He stalks among the dapper gentlemen of this gen- 
eration like a drunken Hercules amid the dainty dan- 
cers," suggested the Christian Spiritualist (1856). "The 
book abounds in passages that cannot be quoted in 
drawing rooms, and expressions that fall upon ears 
polite with a terrible dissonance." 

Nor was savage criticism in the years 1855 and 1856 
limited to this side of the Atlantic. The London Critic, 
in a caustic review, found this the mildest comment 
that Whitman's verse warranted: "Walt Whitman 

[13] 



gives us slang in the place of melody, and rowdyism 
in the place of regularity. * * * Walt Whit- 
man libels the highest type of humanity, and calls his 
free speech the true utterance of a man; we who may 
have been misdirected by civilization, call it the expres- 
sion of a beast." 

Noisy as was this babel of discordant voices, one 
friendly greeting rang clear. Leaves of Grass had but 
just come from the press, when Ralph Waldo Emerson, 
from his home in Concord, under date of July 21, 1855, 
wrote to the author in genuine fellowship: 

"I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I 
have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said 
incomparably well, as they must be. I find the cour- 
age of treatment which so delights us, and which large 
perception only can inspire. 

"I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which 
yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for 
such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this 
sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the 
book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, 
namely, of fortifying and encouraging." 

Tracing the popular estimates of Walt Whitman 
through the next five years, expressions of unmeasured 
disapproval similar to those quoted may be found in 
periodicals and in the daily press, with here and there 
grudging admission that despite unseemly tendencies, 

[h] 



there is evident originality and even genius in the pages 
of this unusual book. In a comparatively temperate 
review, August 4, i860, the Cosmopolite, of Boston, 
while deploring that nature is treated here without fig- 
leaves, declares the style wonderfully idiomatic and 
graphic, adding: "In his frenzy, in the fire of his in- 
spiration, are fused and poured out together elements 
hitherto considered antagonistic in poetry — passion, ar- 
rogance, animality, philosophy, brag, humility, rowdy- 
ism, spirituality, laughter, tears, together with the most 
ardent and tender love, the most comprehensive human 
sympathy which ever radiated its divine glow through 
the pages of poems." 

A contemporary of this date, the Boston Post, found 
nothing to commend. "Grass," said the writer, mak- 
ing the title of the book his text, "grass is the gift of 
God for the healthy sustenance of his creatures, and its 
name ought not to be desecrated by being so improperly 
bestowed upon these foul and rank leaves of the poison- 
plants of egotism, irreverance, and of lust, run rampant 
and holding high revel in its shame." 

And the London Lancet, July 7, i860, comments in 
this wise: "Of all the writers we have ever perused, 
Walt Whitman is the most silly, the most blasphemous, 
and the most disgusting. If we can think of any 
stronger epithets, we will print them in a second 
edition." 

[15] 



II 

WHAT were these poems which excited such vitri- 
olic epithets? Taking both the editions of 1855 
and of the year following, and indeed including all of 
the four hundred poems bearing Whitman's authorship 
in the three-quarters of a half-century during which his 
final volume was in the making, scarcely half a dozen 
poems can be found which could give offense to the 
most prudish persons. Nearly all of these have been 
grouped, with some others, under the general sub-title 
Children of Adam. There are poems which excite the 
risibles of some readers, there are poems which read 
like the lists of a mail-order house, and others which 
appear in spots to have been copied bodily from a gazet- 
teer. These, however, are more likely to provoke good- 
natured banter than violent denunciatory passion. Even 
Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose generous greeting and 
meed of praise in the birth-year of Leaves of Grass will 
be recalled, in sending a copy of it to Carlyle in i860, 
and commending it to his interest, added: "And after 
you have looked into it, if you think, as you may, that 
it is only an auctioneer's inventory of a warehouse, you 
can light your pipe with it." 

[17] 



Had Whitman omitted the few poems whose titles are 
given here, doubtless a few readers would have found 
his formless verses either curious or ludicrous, or merely 
stupid, and others would have passed them by as un- 
meriting even casual attention. The poems which are 
chiefly responsible for a controversy which raged for 
half a century, are these: 

I sing the body electric. 

A woman waits for me. 

To a common prostitute. 

The dalliance of the eagles. 
Wholly dissociated from the picturesque personal- 
ity from which the book emanated, Leaves of Grass 
bears a unique story margined on its pages. The sprawl- 
ing types whose muddy imprint on the ill-proportioned 
pages made up the uncouth first edition of the book, 
were put together by the author's hands, and the sorry 
press work was his handiwork as well. The unusual 
preface and the twelve poems that followed he wrote 
in the open, while lounging on the wharves, while cross- 
ing on ferry-boats, while loitering in the fields, while sit- 
ting on the tops of omnibuses. His physical materials 
were the stubs of pencils, the backs of used envelopes, 
scraps of paper that easily came to hand. The same 
open-air workshops and like crude tools of writing he 
utilized for nearly forty years. During the thirty-seven 
years that intervened between the first printing of his 

[18] 



Leaves and his death in 1892, he followed as his chief 
purpose in life the task he had set himself at the begin- 
ning of his serious authorship — the cumulative expres- 
sion of personality in the larger sense which is manifest 
in the successive and expanding editions of his Leaves 
of Grass. That book becomes therefore, a life history. 
Incompletely as he may have performed this self-im- 
posed task, his own explanation of his purpose may well 
be accepted as made in good faith. That explanation 
appears in the preface to the 1 876 edition, and amid the 
multitude of paper scraps that came into the possession 
of his executors, following his passing away, may be 
found similar clues: 

"It was originally my intention, after chanting in 
Leaves of Grass the songs of the body and of existence, 
to then compose a further, equally-needed volume, based 
on those convictions of perpetuity and conservation 
which, enveloping all precedents, make the unseen soul 
govern absolutely at last. I meant, while in a sort con- 
tinuing the theme of my first chants, to shift the slides 
and exhibit the problem and paradox of the same ardent 
and fully appointed personality entering the sphere of 
the resistless gravitation of spiritual law, and with cheer- 
ful face estimating death, not at all as the cessation, but 
as somehow what I feel it must be, the entrance upon 
by far the greater part of existence, and something 
that life is at least as much for, as it is for itself." 

[19] 



Too long for repetition here, but important in the 
same connection for a full understanding of Walt Whit- 
man's motives, is that Backward Glance O'er Travel'd 
Roads, wherein he summed up his work in fourteen 
pages of prose, and with frank egotism appended this 
anecdote in a footnote on the first page thereof: "When 
Champollion,on his death bed, handed to the printer the 
revised proof of his Egyptian Grammar, he said gayly, 
'Be careful of this — it is my carte de visite to posterity/ *' 

Undaunted when ridicule poured over him, evenly 
tranquil when abuse assailed him, unemotional when 
praise was lavished upon him, unfalteringly and un- 
deviatingly he pursued his way. The group headings 
which were added in successive editions of his book, in- 
dicate the milestones of his journey from the time when 
the Song of Myself noted the beginning, till Whispers 
of Heavenly Death presaged the ending. Familiarity 
with the main incidents and experiences of his life give 
to the several annexes, as he was fond of calling the 
additions that he made to each succeeding issue of his 
Leaves, the clues of chapter headings: Children of 
Adam; Calamus; Birds of Passage; Sea-Drift; By the 
Roadside; Drum-Taps; Autumn Rivulets; Whispers of 
Heavenly Death; Songs of Parting. 

A check list of his principal editions of Leaves of 
Grass, with characteristics noted, would serve almost 
as a chronology of Whitman's life story. 

[20] 



1855 — First Edition. Twelve poems were included 
in this edition. They are without distinctive titles, 
though in later issues they appeared with varying titles, 
those given in the definitive edition being the following: 

Song of myself. 

Song for occupations. 

To think of time. 

The sleepers. 

I sing the body electric. 

Faces. 

Song of the answerer. 

Europe. 

A Boston ballad. 

There was a child went forth. 

My lesson complete. 

Great are the myths. 
1856 — Second Edition. In this edition, the second, 
there are thirty- two poems. The poems are given titles, 
but not the same ones that were finally included. 

1 860 — Third Edition. The number of poems is one 
hundred and fifty-seven. 

1867 — Fourth Edition. The poems have grown in 
number to two hundred and thirty-six. The inclusion 
here of the war cluster Drum-Taps, and a rearrange- 
ment of other clusters, marks this edition as a notable 
one. Drum-Taps had appeared as a separate volume 
two years earlier. 

[21] 



1 871 — Fifth Edition. A total of two hundred and 
seventy-three poems are here classified under general 
titles, including for the first time. Passage to India, and 
After All Not to Create Only, groups which prior to this 
date were issued separately. 

1876 — Sixth Edition. This issue was intended as a 
Centennial edition, and it includes Two Rivulets; there 
are two hundred and ninety-eight poems. 

1881 — Seventh Edition. Intended as the comple- 
tion of a design extending over a period of twenty-six 
years, Whitman had undertaken an extensive revision 
of what he termed his bible of democracy. There are 
three hundred and eighteen poems. This is the edition 
abandoned by the publishers because threatened with 
prosecution by the district attorney. 

1889 — Eighth Edition. In celebration of the 
author's seventieth birthday, a special autograph edi- 
tion of three hundred copies was issued. 

1892 — Ninth Edition. Whitman supervised the 
make-up of this issue during his last illness. 

1897 — Tenth Edition. Here appeared for the first 
time, Old Age Echoes, numbering thirteen poems. 

1902 — Eleventh and Definitive Edition. Issued 
by the literary executors of Walt Whitman — Horace L. 
Traubel, Richard Maurice Bucke, and Thomas B. 
Karned. 

There have been six editions of Whitman's complete 

[12] 



writings, and numerous selections from Leaves of 
Grass have been published under the editorship of 
weli-known literary men — among them, William M. 
Rossetti, Ernest Rhys, W. T. Stead, and Oscar L. 
Triggs. There have been translations into German, 
French, Italian, Russian, and several Asiatic languages. 
"I had my choice when I commence," he notes in his 
Backward Glance of 1880; "I bid neither for soft 
eulogies, big money returns, nor the approbation of 

existing schools and conventions Unstopp'd 

and unwarp'd by any influence outside the soul within 
me, I have had my say entirely my own way, and put it 
unerringly on record — the value thereof to be decided 
by time." 



[23 



Ill 

WITH the war-time period came the turning point 
in the popular estimate of Walt Whitman. No 
doubt, too, his experiences during this time of stress and 
storm influenced the rest of his career as a man and as 
a writer. His service as a volunteer nurse in camp and 
in hospital gave him a sympathetic insight and a patri- 
otic outlook tempered with gentleness which are re- 
flected in his poetry of this period, published under the 
title Drum-Taps. His well-known song of sorrow, O 
Captain, My Captain, is a threnody poignant with 
genuine feeling. It has, more than any others of his 
verses, lyric rather than plangent quality. When Li- 
lacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed, and The Sobbing of 
the Bells are other poems belonging to this distinctive 
group. It is notable that in his lament over the death 
of Lincoln, Whitman gives rhyme as well as rhythm to 
the verses. 

This was a time of triumph for Whitman in a literary 
sense. In Germany, the poet Ferdinand Freiligrath 
contributed to the Allgemeine Zeitung, Augsburg, May 
10, 1868, a long article in praise of his work. In 
England, his poetry attracted the attention of the 

[25] 



Rossettis, Tennyson, John Addington Symonds. Mrs. 
Anne Gilchrist defended him from the aspersions cast 
upon his references to womanhood. A sympathetic 
and friendly tone began to displace the collection 
of distasteful adjectives which had been his meed 
heretofore. 

Then, in the latter part of 1865, occurred an episode 
which drew around Whitman a circle of friends keen to 
resent, and active to condemn, an act of injustice from 
one high in authority. Among the influential friends 
who rushed to his defense were John Burroughs and 
William Douglas O'Connor, and the events which drew 
their fire were these: 

Whitman, whose health was shattered by his untiring 
devotion and ministrations to ill and wounded soldiers, 
had been given a minor clerkship in the Department of 
the Interior. James Harlan was Secretary of the De- 
partment. He had been a Methodist clergyman and 
president of a western college. When his attention was 
called to Whitman's authorship of Leaves of Grass, the 
Secretary characterized the book as "full of indecent 
passages," the author was termed "a very bad man," 
and was abruptly dismissed from the position he had 
held for six months. 

Whitman meekly accepted the curt dismissal, but 
William Douglas O'Connor in a white heat of indignation 
issued a pamphlet which flayed the astonished Secretary 

[26] 






of the Interior as a narrow-minded calumniator. The 
pamphlet, now a very rare document, was headed: 

THE GOOD GRAY POET 

A VINDICATION 

With Celtic fervor and eloquence, William Douglas 
O'Connor made his plea an intercession in the cause of 
free letters. He examined the entire range of litera- 
ture, ancient and modern, in quest of parallels that 
would prove Whitman's book by comparison to be a 
masterpiece of literature, and would demonstrate Mr. 
Secretary Harlan to be merely a literary headsman. Out 
of many pages of allusion to the literary productions of 
the great writers of all time and for all time, some char- 
acteristic passages may be chosen: 

"Here is Dante. Open the tremendous pages of the 
Inferno. What is this line at the end of the twenty- 
first canto, which even John Carlyle flinches from trans- 
lating, but which Dante did not flinch from writing? 
Out with Dante! 

"Here is the book of Job: the vast Arabian landscape, 
the picturesque pastoral details of Arabian life, the last 
tragic immensity of Oriental sorrow, the whole over- 
arching sky of Oriental piety, are here. But here also 
the inevitable 'indecency.' Out with Job! 

"Here is Plutarch, prince of biographers, and Hero- 
dotus, flower of historians. What have we now ? Traits 
of character not to be mentioned, incidents of conduct, 
accounts of manners, minute details of customs, which 

lv] 






our modern historical dandies would never venture 
upon recording. Out with Plutarch and Herodotus! 

"Here is Shakespeare: 'indecent passages' everywhere; 
every drama, every poem thickly inlaid with them; 
all that men do displayed, sexual acts treated lightly, 
jested about, mentioned obscenely; the language never 
bolted; slang, gross puns, lewd words, in profusion. 
Out with Shakespeare! 

"Here is the Canticle of Canticles: beautiful, volup- 
tuous poem of love literally, whatever be its mystic 
significance; glowing with the color, odorous with the 
spices, melodious with the voices of the East; sacred 
and exquisite and pure with the burning chastity of pas- 
sion, which completes and exceeds the snowy chastity 
of virgins. This tome, but what to the Secretary? Can 
he endure that the female form should stand thus in a 
poem, disrobed, unveiled, bathed in erotic splendor? 
Look at these voluptuous details, this expression of de- 
sire, this amorous tone and glow, this consecration and 
perfume lavished upon the sensual. No! Out with 
Solomon ! 

"Here is Isaiah. The grand thunder-roll of that 
righteousness, like the lion-roar of Jehovah above the 
guilty world, utters coarse words. Amidst the bolted 
lightnings of that sublime denunciation, coarse thoughts, 
indelicate figures, indecent allusions, flash upon the 
sight, like gross imagery in a midnight landscape. Out 
with Isaiah! 

"Here is Montaigne. Open those great, those virtu- 
ous pages of the unflinching reporter of man; the soul 
all truth and daylight, all candor, probity, sincerity, 

[28] 



reality, eyesight. A few glances will suffice. Cant and 
vice and sniffle have groaned over these pages before. 
Out with Montaigne! 

"Here is Swedenborg. Open this poem of prose, the 
Conjugal Love, to me, a temple, though in ruins; the 
sacred fane, clothed in mist, filled with moonlight, of a 
great though broken mind. What spittle of critic epithets 
stains all here? 'Lewd,' 'sensual/ 'lecherous/ 'coarse/ 
'licentious/ etc. Of course these judgments are final. 
There is no appeal from the tobacco-juice of an expec- 
torating and disdainful virtue. Out with Swedenborg! 

"Here is Goethe: the horrified squealing of prudes is 
not yet silent over pages of Wilhelm Meister: that high 
and chaste book, the Elective Affinities, still pumps up 
oaths from clergymen. Walpurgis has hardly ceased 
its uproar over Faust. Out with Goethe! 

"Here is Cervantes: open Don Quixote, paragon of 
romances, highest result of Spain, best and sufficient 
reason for her life among the nations, a laughing novel 
which is a weeping poem. But talk such as this of 
Sancho Panza and Tummas Cecial under the cork trees, 
and these coarse stories and bawdy words, and this free 
and gross comedy — is it to be endured? Out with 
Cervantes! 

"And here is Lord Bacon himself, in one of whose 
pages you may read, done from the Latin by Spedding 
into a magnificent golden thunder of English, the abso- 
lute defense of the free spirit of the great authors, 
coupled with stern rebuke to the spirit that would pick 
and choose, as dastard and effeminate. Out with Lord 
Bacon ! 



"Not him only,, not these only, not only the writers 
are under the ban. Here is Phidias, gorgeous sculptor 
in gold and ivory, giant dreamer of the Infinite in 
marble; but he will not use the fig-leaf. Here is Rem- 
brandt, who paints the Holland landscape, the Jew, the 
beggar, the burgher, in lights and glooms of Eternity; 
and his pictures have been called 'indecent/ Here is 
Mozart, his music rich with the sumptuous color of all 
sunsets; and it has been called 'sensual/ Here is 
Michael Angelo, who makes art tremble with a new 
and strange afflatus, and gives Europe novel and sub- 
lime forms that tower above the centuries, and accost 
the Greek; and his works have been called 'bestial/ 
Out with them all!" 

In his summing up, stirred to wrath by the low tone 
of contemporary comment, O'Connor proceeded to ex- 
pound the philosophy of literary ideals: 

"The level of the great books is the Infinite, the Ab- 
solute. To contain all, by containing the premise, the 
truth, the idea and feeling of all, to tally the universe 
by profusion, variety, reality, mystery, enclosure, power, 
terror, beauty, service; to be great to the utmost con- 
ceivability of greatness — what higher level than this can 
literature spring to? Up on the highest summit stand 
such works, never to be surpassed, never to be sup- 
planted. Their indecency is not that of the vulgar; 
their vulgarity is not that of the low. Their evil, if it 
be evil, is not there for nothing — it serves; at the base 
of it is Love. Every poet of the highest quality is, in 
the masterly coinage of the author of Leaves of Grass, 
a kosmos. His work, like himself, is a second world, 

[30] 



full of contrarieties, strangely harmonized, and moral 
indeed, but only as the world is moral. Shakespeare is 
all good, Rabelais is all good, Montaigne is all good, not 
because all the thoughts, the words, the manifestations 
are so, but because at the core, and permeating all, is 
an ethic intention — a love which, through mysterious, 
indirect, subtle, seemingly absurd, often terrible and 
repulsive, means, seeks to uplift, and never to degrade. 
It is the spirit in which authorship is pursued, as Augus- 
tus Schlegel has said, that makes it either an infamy or 
a virtue; and the spirit of the great authors, no matter 
what their letter, is one with that which pervades the 
Creation. In mighty love, with implements of pain 
and pleasure, of good and evil, Nature develops man; 
genius also, in mighty love, with implements of pain and 
pleasure, of good and evil, develops man; no matter 
what the means, that is the end. 

"Tell me not, then, of the indecent passages of the 
great poets. The world, which is the poem of God, is 
full of indecent passages! 'Shall there be evil in a city 
and the Lord hath not done it?' shouts Amos. 'I form 
the light, and create darkness; I make peace, and create 
evil; I, the Lord, do all these things/ thunders Isaiah. 
This/ says Coleridge, 'is the deep abyss of the mystery 
of God/ Ay, and the profound of the mystery of genius 
also ! Evil is part of the economy of genius, as it is part 
of the economy of Deity. Gentle reviewers endeavor 
to find excuses for the freedoms of geniuses. 'It is to 
prove that they were above conventionalities/ 'It is 
referable to the age/ Oh, Ossa on Pelion, mount piled 
on mount, of error and folly! What has genius, spirit 

[31] 



of the absolute and the eternal, to do with the defini- 
tions of position, or conventionalities, or the age? 
Genius puts indecencies into its works, because God 
puts them into His world. Whatever the special reason 
in each case, this is the general reason in all cases. They 
are here, because they are there. That is the eternal 
why. No; Alphonso of Castile thought that, if he had 
been consulted at the Creation, he could have given a 
few hints to the Almighty. Not I. I play Alphonso 
neither to genius nor to God. 

"What is this poem, for the giving of which to Amer- 
ica and the world, and for that alone, its author has 
been dismissed with ignominy from a Government 
office? It is a poem which Schiller might have hailed 
as the noblest specimen of native literature, worthy of a 
place beside Homer. It is, in the first place, a work 
purely and entirely American, autochthonic, sprung 
from our own soil; no savor of Europe nor the past, nor 
of any other literature in it; a vast carol of our own land, 
and of its Present and Future; the strong and haughty 
psalm of the Republic. There is not one other book, I 
care not whose, of which this can be said. I weigh my 
words and have considered well. Every other book by 
an American author implies, both in form and sub- 
stance, I cannot even say the European, but the British 
mind. The shadow of Temple Bar and Arthur's Seat 
lies dark on all our letters. Intellectually we are still 
a dependency of Great Britain, and one word — colonial 
— comprehends and stamps our literature. In no liter- 
ary form, except our newspapers, has there been any- 
thing distinctively American. I note our best books — 

[32] 



the works of Jefferson, the romances of Brockden 
Brown, the speeches of Webster, Everett's rhetoric, the 
divinity of Channing, some of Cooper's novels, the writ- 
ings of Theodore Parker, the poetry of Bryant, the 
masterly law arguments of Lysander Spooner, the mis- 
cellanies of Margaret Fuller, the histories of Hildreth, 
Bancroft and Motley, Ticknor's History of Spanish 
Literature, Judd's Margaret, the political treatises of 
Calhoun, the rich, benignant poems of Longfellow, the 
ballads of Whittier, the delicate songs of Philip Pendle- 
ton Cooke, the weird poetry of Edgar Poe, the wizard 
tales of Hawthorne, Irving's Knickerbocker, Delia Ba- 
con's splendid sibyllic book on Shakespeare, the polit- 
ical economy of Carey, the prison letters and immortal 
speech of John Brown, the lofty patrician eloquence of 
Wendell Phillips, and those diamonds of the first water, 
the great clear essays and greater poems of Emerson. 
This literature has often commanding merits, and much 
of it is very precious to me; but in respect to its national 
character, all that can be said is that it is tinged, more 
or less deeply, with America; and the foreign model, 
the foreign standards, the foreign ideas, dominate over 
it all. 

"At most, our best books were but struggling beams; 
behold in Leaves of Grass the immense and absolute 
sunrise! It is all our own! The nation is in it! In 
form a series of chants, in substance it is an epic of 
America. It is distinctively and utterly American. 
Without model, without imitation, without reminis- 
cence, it is evolved entirely from our own polity and 
popular life. Look at what it celebrates and contains! 

[33} 



hardly to be enumerated without sometimes using the 
powerful, wondrous phrases of its author, so indissoluble 
are they with the things described. The essences, the 
events, the objects of America; the myriad, varied land- 
scapes; the teeming and giant cities; the generous and 
turbulent populations; the prairie solitudes, the vast 
pastoral plateaus; the Mississippi; the land dense with 
villages and farms; the habits, manners, customs; the 
enormous diversity of temperatures; the immense geog- 
raphy; the red aborigines passing away, 'charging the 
water and the land with names'; the early settlements; 
the sudden uprising and defiance of the Revolution; the 
august figure of Washington; the formation and sacred- 
ness of the Constitution; the pouring in of the emi- 
grants; the million-masted harbors; the general opu- 
lence and comfort; the fisheries, and whaling, and gold- 
digging, and manufactures, and agriculture; the 
dazzling movement of new States, rushing to be great; 
Nevada rising, Dakota rising, Colorado rising; the 
tumultuous civilization around and beyond the Rocky 
Mountains, thundering and spreading; the Union im- 
pregnable; feudalism in all its forms forever tracked and 
assaulted; liberty deathless on these shores; the noble 
and free character of the people; the equality of male 
and female; the ardor, the fierceness, the friendship, the 
dignity, the enterprise, the affection, the courage, the 
love of music, the passion for personal freedom; the 
mercy and justice and compassion of the people; the 
popular faults and vices and crimes; the deference of 
the President to the private citizen; the image of Christ 
forever deepening in the public mind as the brother of 

[34] 



despised and rejected persons; the promise and wild 
song of the future; the vision of the Federal Mother, 
seated with more than antique majesty in the midst of 
her many children; the pouring glories of the hereafter; 
the vistas of splendor, incessant and branching, the tre- 
mendous elements, breeds, adjustments of America — 
with all these, with more, with everything transcendent, 
amazing and new, undimmed by the pale cast of 
thought, and with the very color and brawn of actual 
life, the whole gigantic epic of our continental being un- 
winds in all its magnificent reality in these pages. To 
understand Greece, study the Iliad and the Odyssey; 
study Leaves of Grass to understand America. Her 
democracy is there. Would you have a text-book of 
democracy? The writings of Jefferson are good; De 
Tocqueville is better; but the great poet always con- 
tains historian and philosopher — and to know the com- 
prehending spirit of this country, you shall question 
these insulted pages." 



[35] 



IV 

IT would be wearisome to refer in detail to the numer- 
ous estimates of Leaves of Grass which have found 
print since 1870. The increasing literature about Whit- 
man bespeaks interest, and the kindly tenor of most 
commentators testifies to the enlarging appreciation of 
the Good Gray Poet. Within the past decade there 
have appeared seven biographies of him, all but one of 
them wholly and frankly lavish in his praise, and that 
one not unfriendly in criticism. Numerous book chap- 
ters have dealt with him in recognition of his genius, and 
only here and there have there been suggestions of 
earlier absolute condemnation. Among the biographers 
have been, in chronological sequence, Richard Maurice 
Bucke, John Burroughs, John Addington Symonds, 
Isaac Hull Piatt, Geo. R. Carpenter, Bliss Perry, Henry 
Bryan Binns. Among the notable contributors of book 
chapters on Whitman may be mentioned from a list of 
two score or more, Robert Louis Stevenson, in his 
Studies of Men and Books; A. T. Quiller-Couch, in his 
Adventures in Criticism; Thomas Wentworth Higgin- 
son, in his Contemporaries; Havelock Ellis, in The New 
Spirit; Edward Dowden, in his Studies in Literature; 

[37] 



Edmund Gosse, in his Critical Kit-Kats; Hamilton Ma- 
bie, in his Backgrounds of Literature; Brander Mat- 
thews, in his Aspects of Fiction; Edmund Clarence 
Stedman, in his Poets of America; George Santayana, 
in The Poetry of Barbarism; and Algernon Charles 
Swinburne, in his Studies in Prose and Poetry. These 
have been mentioned specifically because they average 
the good and the bad rather than join in a chorus of 
indiscriminate praise. Indeed, the two last mentioned 
are distinctly hostile in tone. Swinburne, who in his 
earlier volume Songs before Sunrise, addressed a long 
poem, To Walt Whitman in America, fervent in praise, 
"Send but a song oversea for us, 
Heart of their hearts who are free, 
Heart of their singer to be for us 
More than our singing can be," 
revoked all his former words of sympathetic admiration 
and in his later volume, printed in 1894, vehemently fell 
upon Whitman in this strain: 

"There is no subject which may not be treated with 
success (I do not say there are no subjects which on 
other than artistic grounds it may not be as well to 
avoid, it may not be better to pass by) if the poet, by 
instinct or by training, knows exactly how to handle it 
aright, to present it without danger of just or rational 
offense. For evidence of this truth we need look no 
further than the pastorals of Virgil and Theocritus. But 
under the dirty clumsy paws of a harper whose plectrum 

[38] 



is a muck-rake any tune will become a chaos of discords, 
though the motive of the tune should be the first prin- 
ciple of nature — the passion of man for woman or the 
passion of woman for man. And the unhealthily dem- 
onstrative and obtrusive animalism of the Whitmaniad 
is as unnatural, as incompatible with the wholesome 
instincts of human passion, as even the filthy and in- 
human asceticism of SS. Macarius and Simeon Stylites. 
If anything can justify the serious and deliberate dis- 
play of merely physical emotion in literature or in art, 
it must be one of two things; intense depth of feeling 
expressed with inspired perfection of simplicity, with 
divine sublimity of fascination, as by Sappho; or trans- 
cendent supremacy of actual and irresistible beauty in 
such revelation of naked nature as was possible to 
Titian. But Mr. Whitman's Eve is a drunken apple- 
woman, indecently sprawling in the slush and garbage 
of the gutter amid the rotten refuse of her overturned 
fruit-stall: but Mr. Whitman's Venus is a Hottentot 
wench under the influence of cantharides and adulter- 
ated rum." 

Weighing the good and the bad, Robert Louis Steven- 
son in his essay does not stint admiration nor withhold 
blame: 

"He has chosen a rough, unrhymed, lyrical verse; 
sometimes instinct with a fine processional movement; 
often so rugged and careless that it can only be de- 
scribed by saying that he has not taken the trouble to 
write prose * * * and one thing is certain, that 
no one can appreciate Whitman's excellences until he 
has grown accustomed to his faults." 

[39] 



Indicating the attitude of his partisans, John Bur- 
roughs' summing up is fairly representative: 

"Just as ripe, mellowed, storied, ivy-towered, velvet- 
turfed England lies back of Tennyson, and is vocal 
through him; just as canny, covenanting, conscience- 
burdened, craggy, sharp-tongued Scotland lies back of 
Carlyle; just as thrifty, well-schooled, well-housed, pru- 
dent and moral New England lies back of her group of 
poets, and is voiced by them — so America as a whole, 
our turbulent democracy, our self-glorification, our faith 
in the future, our huge mass-movements, our conti- 
nental spirit, our sprawling, sublime and unkempt nature 
lie back of Whitman, and are implied by his work." 

It is not the purpose of this book to interpret Whit- 
man either as a prophet or a poet, except inferentially 
as the words of his critics may carry distinct impres- 
sions. After all, the justest estimate of Whitman and 
his book is his own. Whitman's puzzling characteris- 
tics are best understood if we realize that Leaves of 
Grass is an autobiography — and an extraordinarily can- 
did one — of a man whose peculiar temperament found 
expression in prose-verse. His gentleness, his brusque- 
ness, his egotism, his humility, his grossness, his finer 
nature, his crudeness, his eloquence, are all here. To 
him they were the attributes of all mankind. 
"I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise; 
Regardless of others, ever regardful of others, 
Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man, 

[40] 



Stuff'd with the stuff that is coarse, and stuff'd with 
the stuff that is fine." 
In his virile young manhood he announced with gus- 
to: "I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the 
world." 

In his serene old age he said: "Over the tree-tops I 
float thee a song." 

And this was his conclusion: "I call to the world to 
distrust the accounts of my friends, but listen to my 
enemies as I myself do. I charge you forever reject those 
who would expound me, for I cannot expound myself." 
Whoso challenges Whitman's gift of song may not 
at any rate deny to him the note of melody. This qual- 
ity is strong in his titles particularly: 

Rise O days from your fathomless deeps. 

In cabin'd ships at sea. 

Out of the cradle endlessly rocking. 

Sands at seventy. 

The sobbing of the bells. 

Soon shall the winter's foil be here. 

Thou mother with thy equal brood. 

To the leaven'd soil they trod. 

Yon tides with ceaseless swell. 

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed. 

Sparkles from the wheel. 

Brother of all with generous hand. 

As a strong bird on pinions free. 

[41] 



For a just estimate of Whitman, as for a clear com- 
prehension of the symbolism contained in Leaves of 
Grass, a few blades of the latter will not suffice. It 
must be all, or none. The two poems here given should 
be taken, therefore, not as representative of the whole, 
but as types of two widely variant moods: 

OF olden time, when it came to pass 
That the beautiful god, Jesus, should finish his 
work on earth, 
Then went Judas, and sold the divine youth, 
And took pay for his body. 

Curst was the deed, even before the sweat of the clutch- 
ing hand grew dry; 

And darkness frown'd upon the seller of the like of God, 

Where, as though earth lifted her breast to throw him 
from her, and heaven refus'd him, 

He hung in the air, self-slaughter'd. 

The cycles, with their long shadows, have stalked si- 
lently forward 
Since those days — many a pouch enwrapping meanwhile 
Its fee, like that paid for the son of Mary. 

And still goes one, saying, 

"What will ye give me, and I will deliver this man unto 

you?" 
And they make the covenant, and pay the pieces of silver. 

[42] 



Look forth, deliverer, 

Look forth, first-born of the dead, 

Over the tree-tops of Paradise; 

See thyself in yet-continued bonds, 

Toilsome and poor, thou bear'st man's form again, 

Thou art reviled, scourged, put into prison, 

Hunted from the arrogant equality of the rest; 

With staves and swords throng the willing servants of 
authority, 

Again they surround thee, mad with devilish spite; 

Toward thee stretch the hands of a multitude, like vul- 
tures' talons, 

The nearest spit in thy face, they smite thee with their 
palms; 

Bruised, bloody, and pinion'd is thy body, 

More sorrowful than death is thy soul. 

Witness of anguish, brother of slaves, 

Not with thy price closed the price of thine image: 

And still Iscariot plies his trade. 

THE SOUL, I 

Forever and forever— longer than soil is brown and 
solid — longer than water ebbs and flows. 

Each is not for its own sake, 

I say the whole earth and all the stars in the sky are for 
religion's sake. 

[43] 



Ill 
In this broad earth of ours, 
Amid the measureless grossness and the slag, 
Enclosed and safe within its central heart, 
Nestles the seed perfection. 
By every life a share or more or less, 
None born but it is born, conceal'd or unconceal'd the 
seed is waiting. 

IV 

Do you not see O my brothers and sisters? 
It is not chaos or death — it is form, union, plan — it is 
eternal life — it is Happiness. 

v 

The song is to the singer, and comes back most to him, 
The love is to the lover, and comes back most to him — 
it cannot fail. 

VI 

I see Hermes, unsuspected, dying, well-beloved, saying 

to the people Do not weep for me, 
This is not my true country, I have lived banish* d from my 

true country, I now go back there, 
I return to the celestial sphere where every one goes in his 

turn. 

This is an attempt, incomplete but fairly represent- 
ative as to sources, to trace the changing view during 
half a century of Leaves of Grass and its author. 

[44] 



SONNETS and apostrophes in large number ad- 
dressed to Walt Whitman during the later years of 
his life, and since his passing away, have appeared in 
fugitive form in widely separated sources. A selection 
of these may prove of interest by reason of the names 
attached, as well as because of the subject: 

W I^HE good gray poet" gone! Brave hopeful Walt! 

A He might not be a singer without fault, 
And his large rough-hewn rhythm did not chime 
With dulcet daintiness of time and rhyme. 
He was no neater than wide Nature's wild, 
More metrical than sea winds. Culture's child, 
Lapped in luxurious laws of line and lilt, 
Shrank from him shuddering, who was roughly built 
As cyclopean temples. Yet there rang 
True music through his rhapsodies, as he sang 
Of brotherhood, and freedom, love and hope, 
With strong, wide sympathy which dared to cope 
With all life's phases, and call nought unclean. 
Whilst hearts are generous, and whilst woods are green, 
He shall find hearers, who in a slack time 

[45] 



Of puny bards and pessimistic rhyme, 

Dared to bid men adventure and rejoice. 

His "y aw P barbaric" was a human voice; 

The singer was a man. America 

Is poorer by a stalwart soul today, 

And may feel pride that she hath given birth 

To this stout laureate of old Mother Earth. 

— Punch 



[46] 



GOOD-BYE, WALT! 
Good-bye from all you loved of Earth — 
Rock, tree, dumb creature, man and woman — 
To you their comrade human. 
The last assault 
Ends now, and now in some great world has birth 
A minstrel, whose strong soul finds broader wings, 

More brave imaginings. 
Stars crown the hill-top where your dust shall lie, 
Even as we say good-bye, 
Good-bye, old Walt! 

— Edmund Clarence Stedman 



[47] 



HE was in love with truth and knew her near — 
Her comrade, not her suppliant on the knee: 
She gave him wild melodious words to be 
Made music that should haunt the atmosphere. 
She drew him to her bosom, day-long dear, 
And pointed to the stars and to the sea, 
And taught him miracles and mystery, 
And made him master of the rounded year. 
Yet one gift did she keep. He looked in vain, 
Brow-shaded, through the darkness of the mist, 
Marking a beauty like a wandering breath 
That beckoned, yet denied his soul a tryst: 
He sang a passion, yet he saw not plain 
Till kind earth held him and he spake with death. 

— Harrison S. Morris 



[ 4 8 



SOME find thee foul and rank and fetid, Walt, 
Who cannot tell Arabia from a sty. 
Thou folio weth Truth, nor feareth, nor doth halt; 
Truth: and the sole uncleanness is a lie. 

— William Watson 



[49] 



. 






PRESAGE of strength yet to be, voice of the youngest 
of Time, 
Singer of the golden dawn, 
From thy great message must come light for the better- 
ing days, 
Joy to the hands that toil, 
Might to the hopes that droop, 
Power to the Nation reborn, 
Poet and master and seer, helper and friend unto men, 
Truth that shall pass into the life of us all ! 

— Louis J. Block 



[50] 



SEND but a song oversea for us, 
Heart of their hearts who are free, 
Heart of their singer to be for us 
More than our singing can be; 
Ours, in the tempest at error, 
With no light but the twilight of terror; 
Send us a song oversea! 

Sweet-smelling of pine-leaves and grasses, 
And blown as a tree through and through 

With the winds of the keen mountain passes, 
And tender as sun-smitten dew; 

Sharp-tongued as the winter that shakes 

The wastes of your limitless lakes, 
Wide-eyed as the sea-line's blue. 

O strong-winged soul with prophetic 
Lips hot with the bloodbeats of song, 

With tremor of heartstrings magnetic, 
With thoughts as thunders in throng, 

With consonant ardours of chords 

That pierce men's souls as with swords 
And hale them hearing along. 

— Algernon Swinburne 



[51] 



SERENE, vast head, with silver cloud of hair, 
Lined on the purple dusk of death 
A stern medallion, velvet set — 
Old Norseman throned, not chained upon thy chair: 
Thy grasp of hand, thy hearty breath 
Of welcome thrills me yet 
As when I faced thee there. 

Loving my plain as thou thy sea, 
Facing the east as thou the west, 
I bring a handful of grass to thee, 
The prairie grasses I know the best — 
Type of the wealth and width of the plain, 
Strong of the strength of the wind and sleet, 
Fragrant with sunlight and cool with rain — 
I bring it, and lay it low at thy feet, 
Here by the eastern sea. 

— Hamlin Garland 



[52] 



I TOSS upon Thy grave, 
(After Thy life resumed, after the pause, the back- 
ward glance of Death; 
Hence, hence the vistas on, the march continued, 
In larger spheres, new lives in paths untrodden, 
On ! till the circle rounded, ever the journey on !) 
Upon Thy grave, — the vital sod how thrilled as from 

Thy limbs and breast transpired, 
Rises the spring's sweet utterance of flowers, — 
I toss this sheaf of song, these scattered leaves of love! 
For thee, Thy Soul and Body spent for me, 
— And now still living, now in love, transmitting still 

Thy Soul, Thy Flesh to me, to all! — 
These variant phrases of the long-immortal chant 
I toss upon Thy grave! 

— George Cabot Lodge 



[53} 



1AM no slender singing bird 
That feeds on puny garden seed! 
My songs are stronger than those heard 
In ev'ry wind-full, shallow reed! 
My pipes are jungle-grown and need 
A strong man's breath to blow them well; 
A strong soul's sense to solve their spell 
And be by their deep music stirred. 

My voice speaks not, in lisping notes, 

The madrigals of lesser minds ! 

My heart tones thunder from the throats 

Of throbbing seas and raging winds; 

And yet, the master-spirit finds 

The tenderness of mother earth 

Is there expressed, despite the dearth 

Of tinkle tunes like dancing motes! 

My hand strokes not a golden lyre 
Threaded with silver — spider spun! 
The strings I strike are strands of fire, 
Strung from Earth's center to the Sun! 
Thrilled with passion, ev'ry one! 
With songs of forest, corn, and vine; 
Of rushing water, blood, and wine; 
Of man's conception and desire! 



[54] 



But listen, comrade! This I say: 

In all of all I give my heart! 

With lover's voice I bid you stay 

To share with me the better part 

Of all my days ! nights ! thoughts ! and start 

With far-spread arms to welcome you, 

And we will shout a song so true 

That it shall ring for aye and aye. 

— Ray Clarke Rose 



[55] 



YOUR lonely muse, unraimented with rhyme, 
Her hair unfilleted, her feet unshod, 
Naked and not ashamed demands of God 
No covering for her beauty's youth or prime. 
Clad but with thought, as space is clad with time, 
Or both with worlds where man and angels plod, 
She runs in joy, magnificently odd, 
Ruggedly wreathed with flowers of every clime. 
And you to whom her breath is sweeter far 
Than choicest attar of the martyred rose 
More deeply feel mortality's unrest 
Than poets born beneath a happier star, 
Because the pathos of your grand repose 
Shows that all earth has throbbed within your breast. 

— Albert Edmund Lancaster 



[56] 



THEY say that thou art sick, art growing old, 
Thou Poet of unconquerable health, 
With youth far-stretching, through the golden wealth 
Of autumn, to Death's frostful, friendly cold; 
The never-blenching eyes, that did behold 
Life's fair and foul, with measureless content, 
And gaze ne'er sated, saddened as they bent 
Over the dying soldier in the fold 
Of thy large comrade love: — then broke the tear! 
War-dream, field-vigil, the bequeathed kiss, 
Have brought old age to thee; yet, Master, now, 
Cease not thy song to us; lest we should miss 
A death-chant of indomitable cheer, 
Blown as a gale from God; — Oh, sing it thou! 

— Aaron Leigh 



[57 



OPURE heart singer of the human frame 
Divine, whose poesy disdains control 
Of slavish bonds ! each poem is a soul, 
Incarnate born of thee, and given thy name. 
Thy genius is unshackled as a flame 
That sunward soars, the central light its goal; 
Thy thoughts are lightnings, and thy numbers roll 
In Nature's thunders that put art to shame. 
Exalter of the land that gave thee birth, 
Though she insult thy grand gray years with wrong 
Of infamy, foul-branding thee with scars 
Of felon-hate, still shalt thou be on earth 
Revered, and in Fame's firmament of song 
Thy name shall blaze among the eternal stars! 

— Leonard Wheeler 



[58] 



O TITAN soul, ascend your starry steep, 
On golden stair, to gods and storied men ! 
Ascend! nor care where thy traducers creep. 

For what may well be said of prophets, when 
A world that's wicked comes to call them good? 
Ascend and sing! As kings of thought who stood 

On stormy heights, and held far lights to men, 
Stand thou, and shout above the tumbled roar, 
Lest brave ships drive and break against the shore. 
What though thy sounding song be roughly set? 

Parnassus' self is rough! Give thou the thought, 
The golden ore, the gems that few forget; 

In time the tinsel jewel will be wrought. 
Stand thou alone, and fixed as destiny, 

An imaged god that lifts above all hate; 

Stand thou serene and satisfied with fate; 
Stand thou as stands the lightning-riven tree, 
That lords the cloven clouds of gray Yosemite. 
Yea, lone, sad soul, thy heights must be thy home; 

Thou sweetest lover! love shall climb to thee 
Like incense curling some cathedral dome, 

From many distant vales. Yet thou shalt be, 
O grand, sweet singer, to the end alone. 

But murmur not. The moon, the mighty spheres, 

Spin on alone through all the soundless years; 
Alone man comes on earth; he lives alone; 
Alone he turns to front the dark unknown. 

— Joaquin Miller 

[59] 






1KNEW there was an old, white-bearded seer 
Who dwelt among the streets of Camden town; 
I had the volumes which his hand wrote down — 
The living evidence we love to hear 
Of one who walks reproachless, without fear. 
But when I saw that face, capped with its crown 
Of snow-white almond-buds, his high renown 
Faded to naught, and only did appear 
The calm old man, to whom his verses tell, 
All sounds were music, even as a child; 
And then the sudden knowledge on me fell, 
For all the hours his fancies had beguiled, 
No verse had shown the Poet half so well 
As when he looked into my face and smiled. 

— Linn Porter 



[60] 



FRIEND WHITMAN! wert thou less serene and 
kind, 
Surely thou mightest (like the bard sublime), 
Scorned by a generation deaf and blind, 
Make thine appeal to the avenger TIME; 
For thou art none of those who upward climb, 
Gathering roses with a vacant mind. 
Ne'er have thy hands for jaded triflers twined 
Sick flowers of rhetoric and weeds of rhyme. 
Nay, thine hath been a Prophet's stormier fate. 
While LINCOLN and the martyr'd legions wait 
In the yet widening blue of yonder sky, 
On the great strand below them thou art seen, 
Blessing, with something Christ-like in thy mien, 
A sea of turbulent lives, that break and die. 

— Robert Buchanan 



61] 



DARKNESS and death? Nay, Pioneer, for thee 
The day of deeper vision has begun; 
There is no darkness for the central sun 
Nor any death for immortality. 
At last the song of all fair songs that be, 
At last the guerdon of a race well run, 
The upswelling joy to know the victory won, 
The rivers rapture when it finds the sea. 
Ah, thou art wrought in an heroic mould, 
The Modern Man upon whose brow yet stays 
A gleam of glory from the age of gold — 
A diadem which all the gods have kissed. 
Hail and farewell ! Flower of the antique days, 
Democracy's divine protagonist. 

— Francis Howard Williams 



[62 



TRANQUIL as stars that unafraid 
Pursue their way through space, 
Vital as light, unhoused as wind, 
Unloosed from time and place; 

Solemn as birth, and sane as death, 
Thy bardic chan tings move; 
Rugged as earth, and salt as sea, 
And bitter-sweet as love. 

— May Morgan 



[6 3 ] 



ONE master poet royally her own, 
Begot of Freedom, bore our Western World: 
A poet, native as the dew impearl'd 
Upon her grass; a brother, thew and bone, 
To mountains wild, vast lakes and prairies lone; 
One, life and soul, akin to speech unfurl'd, 
And zeal of artisan, and song not curl'd 
In fronded forms, or petrified in tone. 
High latitudes of thought gave breath to him; 
The paps he suck'd ran not false shame for milk; 
No bastard he! but virile truth in limb 
And soul. A Titan mocking at the silk 
That bound the wings of song. A tongue of flame, 
Whose ashes gender an immortal name. 

— Joseph W. Chapman 



[6 4 ] 



THOU lover of the cosmos vague and vast, 
In which thy virile mind would penetrate 
Unto the rushing, primal springs of fate, 
Ruling alike the future, present, past: 
Now, having breasted waves beyond death's blast, 
New Neptune's steeds saluted, white and great, 
And entered through the glorious Golden Gate. 
And gained the fair celestial shores at last, 
Still worship'st thou the Ocean? thou that tried 
To comprehend its mental roar and surge, 
Its howling as of victory and its dirge 
For continents submerged by shock and tide. 
By that immortal ocean now what cheer? 
Do crews patrol and save the same as here? 

— Edward S. Creamer 



[65] 



ALL hail to thee! WALT WHITMAN! Poet, Pro- 
/jl phet, Priest! 

Celebrant of Democracy! At more than regal feast 
To thee we offer homage, and with our greenest bay 
We crown thee Poet Laureate on this thy natal day. 
We offer choice ascription — our loyal tribute bring, 
In this the new Olympiad in which thou reignest king. 
POET of the present age, and of aeons yet to be, 
In this the chosen homestead of those who would be 

free- 
Free from feudal usage, from courtly sham and cant; 
Free from kingcraft, priestcraft, with all their rot and 

rant! 
PROPHET of a race redeemed from all conventual 

thrall, 
Espouser of equal sexship in body, soul, and all ! 
PRIEST of a ransom'd people, endued with clearer 

light; 
A newer dispensation for those of psychic sight. 
We greet thee as our mentor, we meet thee as our friend, 
And to thy ministrations devotedly we lend 
The aid that comes from fealty which thou hast made 

so strong, 
Thro' touch of palm, and glint of eye, and spirit of thy 

song. 
We magnify thy mission, we glorify thy aim, 
Unfalteringly adhered to through ill-report and blame — 

[66] 






The fretting of the groundlings, the fumings of the pit, 
The jibes and jeers and snarls and sneers which men 

mistake for wit. 
We knew the rising splendor of thy sun could never 

wane 
Until, the earth encompass'd, it sank in dazzling flame. 
In faith assured we waited as in patience thou didst 

wait, 
Knowing full well the answer must sooner come or late. 
And come it has, sufficingly, the discord disappears 
Until today again is heard the music of the spheres 
Proclaiming thee the well-beloved, peer of the proudest 

peers. 

— Henry L. Bonsai/ 



[67] 



HE fell asleep when in the century's skies 
The paling stars proclaimed another day — 
He, genial still, amidst the chill and gray, 
With smiling lips and trustful, dauntless eyes; 
He, the Columbus of a vast emprise, 
Whose realization in the future lay; 
He, who stepped from the well-worn, narrow way 
To walk with Poetry in larger guise. 
And fortunate, despite of transient griefs, 
The years announce him in a new born age; 
The ship of his fair fame, past crags and reefs, 
Sails bravely on, and less and less the rage 
Of gainsaying winds becomes; while to his phrase 
The world each day gives ampler heed and praise ! 

— William Struthers 



[68] 



HERE health we pledge you in one draught of song, 
Caught in this rhymster's cup from earth's delight, 
Where English fields are green the whole year long — 
The wine of might, 
That the new-come spring distills, most sweet and 

strong, 
In the viewless air's alembic, that's wrought too fine for 

sight. 
Good health! we pledge, that care may lightly sleep, 
And pain of age be gone for this one day, 
As of this loving cup you take, and, drinking deep, 
Are glad at heart straightway 
To feel once more the friendly heat of the sun 
Creative in you (as when in youth it shone), 
And pulsing brainward with the rhythmic wealth 
Of all the summer whose high minstrelsy 
Shall soon crown field and tree, 
To call back age to youth again, and pain to perfect 

health. 

— Ernest Rhys 



[6 9 ] 






I LOAF and invite my soul 
And what do I feel? 
An influx of life from the great central power 
That generates beauty from seedling to flower. 
I loaf and invite my soul 
And what do I hear? 
Original harmonies piercing the din 
Of measureless tragedy, sorrow and sin. 
I loaf and invite my soul 
And what do I see ? 
The temple of God in the perfected man, 
Revealing the wisdom and end of earth's plan. 

— Elizabeth Porter Gould 



[70] 



HE passed amid the noisy throngs, 
His elbow touched with theirs; 
They grumbled at their petty wrongs, 
Their woes and cares; 

They asked if "Princeton stood to win"; 

Or what they should invest; 
They told with gusto and with grin 

Some futile jest. 

They jostled him and passed him by, 

Nor slacked their eager pace; 
They did not mark that noble eye, 

That noble face. 

So carelessly they let him go, 
His mien they could not scan, — 

Thinker whom all the world would know, 
Our greatest man. 

Max J. Herzberg 



[71] 






HERE ends this book written by Henry Eduard 
Legler, arranged in this form by Laurence C. 
Woodworth, Scrivener, and printed for the Brothers 
of the Book at the press of The Faithorn Company, 
Chicago, 1 91 6. 




hicipit Vita Nova 



fi 







' Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. | 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Oct. 2009 

, PreservationTechnologies 

^0 A WORLD LEADER IN COLLECTIONS PRESERVATION 

(\ * 111 Thomson Park Drive 



Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 







W* N ' 



— ^ _J^ 

MANCHESTER. 
|NDIANA_____J 






.4^ 






